Kali's Tale
by Jack Brennan
Summary: Following the events of New Face in Town, Kali returns in another tale of Augmented violence, as she sets out on the mission that brought her to Pandora.
1. Chapter 1

Kali's Tale: A Girl's Gotta Work

Bliss.

Falling water drenched Kali in sweet relief. Slowly the fatigue of the long day bled away as the lukewarm shower washed the sand, salt and blood from her pores. Finally turning off the flow, she caught sight of herself framed in the mirror against the dark velvet of the night. The single lamp's warm light clothed her powerful warrior body in unaccustomed softness, a shimmering jewelled film. A halo of dark hair framed a face that, just for a moment, showed only simple relaxation. A smile quirked her lips, slowly reaching all the way to emerald green eyes. Half a Pandoran day on-planet and she was becoming self-indulgent! She shrugged at herself. The iron discipline of Promethea was light-years away, and she was content with that.

Towelling herself, she took a tall bottle from the decrepit fridge and padded silently to the room's one and only window. The lights were sparse out there, she thought. The Hyperion company town on the horizon threw a harsh white glow into the night and the little hill community where she had paused showed a few comforting home-fires burning. For the most part though, the world was dark; little scatters of light here and there, huddled for protection, while out there in the hungry shadow, tracer ripped and headlights slashed as predators wandered the land.

She took a pull at the bottle, and flinched at its rawness. She scowled at the label: Rakk Ale?! Feeling the liquid burn down her throat, she didn't doubt it for a minute. Her eyes bored into the dark again. Tomorrow she'd be beyond "civilisation's" margins, even as Pandora measured it. Tomorrow, she felt, would be an opportunity to experience the real Pandora. Her journey had started well and she dared hope for more in the time allowed her. She took another long, bitter drink.

Killing is a thirsty business.

The skag roared.

The sound rolled on and on, as if the desert itself had found a voice. As the echoes faded up into the moon-filled sky, a heavily armoured adult erupted from its den, trifold jaws agape. Instantly it sprang at the prey, two hundred kilograms of relentless eating machine launched like a living missile to rend and tear.

Kali thought it was beautiful.

The flex of its powerful muscles, the sunlight glinting from the intricate organic armour, the lean economy of its form; there was no doubt it possessed a brutal elegance. It was…_nice… _to see such a perfect product of evolution in action. Pandora was very different from home, she thought idly, as she judged the animal's trajectory.

The skag's head and forequarters exploded in mid-leap in a shower of blood and shredded meat. The shattered corpse tumbled to a halt at Kali's feet as she methodically reloaded the shotgun. For a moment silence reigned as she knelt to study the body, but a rising drumming beat in the very earth alerted her that her first skag experience was not yet over. Turning, she saw a tide of dark jagged forms hurtling from their own dens amongst the rock outcrops. A chorus of roars began to fill the air.

The Runner was too far to be an option; so be it. Kali triggered her combat system. The electric thrill of Augmentation rushed through the nano-scale circuitry that suffused her brain and body. Her vision filled with targeting information for the weapon system that body and gun had now become. Firing from the hip, she walked a steady rhythm of explosive rounds across the leading skags. The animals went rolling to ruin in a welter of blood and broken bone, a dense red mist condensing for a moment out of the icy desert air above their torn and dying bodies. The bloody haze was suddenly parted by a still greater monster, easily the size of a horse, racing to the attack. Kali watched calmly as half a ton of murder filled her field of view. Mere metres away, its mouth gaped wide, as if to take her whole.

That'll do, she thought.

The shotgun out-roared the skag itself. Even as the explosive shot tore at the animal's head and throat Kali was pivoting, pirouetting in a ballet of death as the skag's momentum carried it onward, allowing her to fire into its unarmoured flank. The beast's rank musk enveloped her as it passed, a living wall, close enough to touch. Time seemed to slow. She could hear the metallic rhythm of the weapon's breech as it cycled, see the animal's flesh flinch and tear under the impacts, almost feel its heartbeat…

Normal time reasserted itself. Its spine shot through, the skag folded up in a cloud of dust like a broken doll, flesh cratered and hanging in strips. Kali holstered the shotgun and shivered as Augmentation released its grip on her. Slowly, the dust settled, and the natural sounds of the place reasserted themselves. Assessing the battlefield, she saw that though the lesser skags were clearly dead, the pack leader still hung on to life. Carefully she approached the mortally wounded animal. Even lying prone, its body was shoulder-high to her. Though it lay near death, its glinting armour and massive muscularity radiated a potent life force; badass indeed! She felt a powerful sense of the skag's rightness as part of this landscape. Running a hand over its quivering hide, she stooped to stroke the battered skull.

"Such a shame", she whispered.

The huge head whipped around without warning, jaws stretching wide to bite down with enough force to cut a human in half. Kali's shield flared resistance for a fraction of a second and collapsed.

It was enough. Desperately triggering her combat system, she was able to get a hand to each of the upper jaws. Gene-engineered muscle trembled with strain as she was driven to her knees by the impact. Blood was streaming down her arms as the skag's teeth pierced her hands and her reinforced bones actually creaked under the load, but she held. The skag attempted to shake her like a terrier with a rat but again, she held. Despite the situation, she counted herself fortunate. Not only was the skag unable to bring its full weight to bear due to its immobilised rear legs, but her first shot had shattered the animal's lower jaw. If that had still been functional, swinging at her face like a hatchet, she would have been in dire trouble. Her lips twisted in a smile made of sarcasm and pain. Unlike now of course…

The skag's roar was now a deafening scream of agony and rage, a rain of blood and phlegm. The huge animal strained and thrashed in her grasp, still going for the kill. Truly, she thought, this was something they could never have prepared her for in combat school.

Not even on Promethea.

Teeth gritted, she brought up one foot, fought for breath. Placing the other foot securely, she convulsively thrust herself to full height, roaring defiance, still with the skag's head pinned in her superhuman grip. Kali felt the creature's eyes boring into her own. She saw a soul there; a living thing acting according to its nature, without pity, without remorse.

"Sorry my friend", she gasped, "not today". Wrenching her injured hands free, she slammed the skag's head to the ground, drew her revolver with a near-invisible blur and put two heavy bullets into its brain before it could even flinch. She drew a great shuddering breath.

"Not today".

Kali was discovering that she liked driving.

Oh, she was proficient in driving or piloting a wide variety of combat vehicles. This though, just _driving, _chasing down the horizonina fast car over a seemingly limitless landscape with the wind in her hair and the scent of the land filling her senses was, was wonderful. Of course, (her hands flexed on the steering wheel), it did pay to be careful how far you wandered when stretching your legs. After three days of experiencing Pandora's extraordinary terrain, not to mention its inhabitants, she was coming to understand the appeal of this planet, despite its dangers. It was a world of many…freedoms.

Those were thoughts for another day though. A mental command brought a translucent map overlay of her position into her vision. Her superiors had decided not to risk accessing the local GPS; her eyes flickered momentarily to Hyperion's recently-arrived orbital facility. It appeared though that inertial guidance alone was providing a close match to the terrain she was passing. Excellent! Assuming the data she had was accurate, she shouldn't need to get her boots too dusty before she was actually standing in front of her goal. In fact…She eased back on the throttle as the Runner crested a final rise. She pulled up and dismounted. Before her stretched a tremendous valley, opening out into the distant east.

Her hunting ground.

Her Atlas database information was quite comprehensive, though in this case there was a crucial gap. Two days of careful searching for the lost and camouflaged entrance had proved fruitless, when inspiration had struck. So here she was perched on a crag, the great valley's floor hundreds of metres below.

Waiting.

She idly examined her hands. A Vault Hunter she was not, especially where healing was concerned! Livid scars still marked her like ragged stigmata, but she was fully functional and pain-free. The nanites that suffused her body were slow, but they got the job done. Mercifully, her enhanced body was also immune to the nightmare cocktail of organisms and poisons that undoubtedly filled a skag's mouth. The energy demands of the nanites did leave a girl hungry though. She poured the contents of three self-heating combat rations she'd activated into a large bowl and started to wolf it down. Vat-grown meat and veg never tasted so good.

The silence of the desert pressed in, broken only by a breeze laden with the scent of ice and dust. A riot of colour grew slowly in the eastern sky to herald the oncoming dawn. Kali considered the vista before her, as the last seconds counted down. There are two ways to hunt, she thought.

One can search for and pursue the prey, with all the attendant effort…

The rich light of the new-risen sun flooded the landscape as it crested the horizon.

…or the hunter can choose just the right position, and lie in wait.

Involuntarily, she sprang to her feet. Patterns of unnaturally regular shadow spread like a tide to criss-cross the valley floor beneath her. The brilliant light of the true-dawn, coming in almost horizontally, lit the landscape in a way that the usual diffuse and variable glow of the Pandoran day did not. Roads, mine diggings, the foundations of vanished structures; all were revealed in sharp relief. For a few seconds it was all there to see, all the works of man so painstakingly erased and concealed. The sun lifted a fraction of a degree more…and it was gone, without trace. Kali looked down from her high place, and her smile was brighter than the dawn.

Time to go to work.

A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world.

"So much for stealth", Kali muttered. She'd barely entered the huge cavern within when the damn door she'd unlocked slammed shut in a cloud of rust equally as violently as it had opened, plunging her into darkness. Given the lack of traces and level of concealment, she had no reason to believe that the facility was inhabited, but the noise was an insult to her professionalism. She would have to do better from now on. She stepped forward, activating an infrared headlamp that her gene-modified eyes could use; and light flickered into existence across hundreds of square metres of ceiling.

"Oh, perfect".

A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world.

Ticktock flinched at the sound, as he did at all sights and sounds that alarmed him. He cringed and flinched again as a shaft of sunlight speared briefly into the comfortable darkness of his home and was just as suddenly cut off by another ringing clang. His heart raced with fear. Sunlight meant Outside; Outside meant danger; Outside was where his kin hunted; Outside was the smell of blood and lust and sky. No Outside had ever come into his home before! A voice sounded under the echoes, but he couldn't understand it. Fear still coursed through him, but something about the voice caught and clung at his mind. None of his brethren sounded like that. Light flared again! Not the harsh rays of the sun though, but the softer light of the Inside world, laying bare to sight the metal and concrete world he knew so well by touch. Cowering in his nest he sought comfort, as always, in the Beauty that surrounded him.

"Save me", he squeaked.

A great sound echoed in the deepness of the world, and a flowering of light.

The hive awakened.


	2. Chapter 2: A Breath of Fresh Air

Kali's Tale: A Breath of Fresh Air

The hive awakened.

It was never completely still in the hive. It constantly seethed and murmured to its own myriad rhythms of life and death, a world apart from whatever passed as normal on the rest of Pandora. The world behind the hidden doors was always thought of like that by its inhabitants. Inside was home, dark and warm, while Outside was the place of feeding and light and slaughter and terrifying horizons. Inside was meant to be safe, meant to be secret. Kali's arrival changed everything.

If you listen carefully, you can hear them move.

"Oh perfect!"

The light flooded into the furthest recesses of the room. With the sound of the slamming door still echoing, Kali forced herself to ease her grip on her combat rifle. She continued to silently curse her rookie mistake as she scanned the space for threats. She was near one end of a huge split-level vehicle bay, easily 200 metres long and 40 deep by 20 high, littered with garbage. A big drop barge loomed at the far end, while the intervening area held several utility vehicles and, of all things, a TL-27; a Buzzard. Smiling, she walked over and laid a hand on the fuselage of the compact killing machine. She'd spent a lot of hours at the controls of the tough little tilt-jets in Promethea's unfriendly skies. She turned to examine the near end of the hangar. Involuntarily, she took a sudden step back.

The Vault Hunter leapt into the room.

The image was famous across the worlds; Lilith, face aglow with the joy of combat, arm outstretched as she conjured her Siren power. Here, in this unlikely place, an artist had created a Lilith stern and beautiful, strong and desirable. Six metres tall she stood, dominating the near wall of the hangar. Her hips and long elegant legs were painted in perspective, while her upper body and profiled face emerged from the wall, sculpted in relief from a composite of whatever materials the artist had been able to scrounge from the litter and garbage that cluttered the former vehicle bay. On the one hand the image could be called crude, both because of the roughness of its finish and the exaggeration of Lilith's breasts. On the other hand, there was an undoubted power in the depiction. The eyes in particular…

A scuttling noise from amongst the litter behind Kali brought the incendiary rifle's barrel into line without conscious thought. Nothing stirred; the seconds stretched out in pregnant silence. She slowly prowled forward, cat-footed, eyes everywhere. The volume of garbage she was seeing was starting to worry her. Weapon crates, broken machinery and general crap littered the whole space. Given that the fall of Atlas was only two years in the past, this amount of debris said that a significant number of people had occupied the facility since the evacuation. She paused next to some rotting food remains. Correction; were _still _occupying the facility…

Footsteps clattered on concrete.

Effortlessly, she leapt to the roof of a car and then vaulted over the railing of the upper level of the hangar to take cover behind a bank of machinery. Two tunnels gave access to the hangar from the interior of the mine. Unfortunately she didn't have line-of-sight down either of the darkened shafts because of the short range. The tempo of the footsteps increased. She'd just settled into place when the neighbours arrived.

The brothers ran screaming into the light. Startled awake from the haunting and terror called sleep, they had been put to the hunt. The little ones, good dogs, had led the way. Away, away from the shelter and comforts of darkness and running, leaping into the brightly singing Light. Where oh where was the prey? Their hunger was a flame and an agony as they fanned out into the space. What was that? A scent, a rainbow of colour and music that came from…

There she was.

Half a dozen psychos erupted from the far entrance. An onrushing jabber of voices filled the near tunnel. Kali flung a grenade into the narrow darkness by way of discouragement and brought her rifle to bear on the nearest hunter. Disciplined bursts of incendiary rounds punched into each man, her shield shivering under a rain of buzz-axes. One, two, three down…the corridor vomited flame and charred body parts…the other psychos coming on, unflinching…trigger held down and full automatic hell spitting forth…four, five down and the last man right _here_ now and the noise of his axe the loudest sound in the world as flame washed him like the Devil's baptism…

He fell. Kali took the opportunity to reload, patting the weapon's receiver and chuckling fondly when she was done; Glorious Havoc indeed.

A shrill, inhuman squealing broke over her. Streams of figures large and small spewed from both tunnels: more tattooed psychos, a horde of Pandora's infamous midgets, couple of steroid abusers and a lumbering giant of a man in a metal full-face helmet slowly bringing up the rear. The entire giggling, shouting carnival of the damned paused for a fraction of a second and then hurled themselves headlong at her, a wave of axes and bullets preceding them. Kali backpedalled furiously, tossing two grenades as she went, trading time for distance, for fighting room.

Kali triggered her combat system, and felt the familiar eye-blink thrill of electricity washing through the nano-scale circuitry that pervaded her body. The sheer power of her gene-engineered musculature and reinforced skeleton was now enhanced by the superhuman speed and spatial awareness that Augmentation provided. The twin MIRV explosions turned a double handful of her twisted assailants to hamburger and momentarily cleared a space in their midst. Rolling another grenade under the feet of the leading edge of the crowd, she crouched and leapt clear over the first two ranks of attackers to land in the grisly circle, revolver now in hand and a smile illuminating her face.

"Hello boys" she yelled, as the detonating grenades highlighted her in an aura of flame and broken flesh.

Ticktock watched as She danced.

When he'd been lured from hiding by the sound of his kin at play, he'd had no idea that he would see…Her! He felt himself swept away by passion. His dreams, his waking world too, were ever-filled with thoughts of Beauty; sweet female shapes and movements and sounds. His burning imagination had driven him to lovingly, oh so lovingly, grace the wall of his world with the loveliest image he knew, to bring joy that much closer to reality. But now She, this she, a new she was here! Oh, Beauty made flesh, Beauty so much greater and more compelling than his dreams, his poor art.

There she had stood, that first moment of seeing her. The fierce joyful face, curves that filled the eyes, rich incomparable inviting laughter! Standing over the charred remains of his kin, rifle butt poised on shapely hip, she had seemed the very incarnation of Desire. Then more of his brethren had emerged from the hive. Ticktock had not feared for her, though murder was surely the least of what filled their minds. He watched with adoring eyes as she had again filled his home with flame and thunder, suddenly to soar above the mere mortals. Of course she could fly! Was she not Death's very own angel? Landing lightly amongst them, she had challenged them to dance...

For that was how she moved. She flitted now with quicksilver speed amongst the ponderously groping attackers, her unearthly grace haloed by the shimmer of her shield. Her dull, close-fitting garb served only to highlight her sweet shining face and the rich curves of her body. Some of his kin fell to the thunderous shots of the potent handgun she bore, bodies spinning and cratering under its impact. Others, more fortunate in Ticktock's mind, felt her actual touch, their flesh and bone breaking wetly under the fierce caresses of fist or elbow, boot or knee. The fall of their lifeless bodies was a deadly increasing tempo, voices, screams and shots decreasing with the passage of every second...

Kali perched a hip on an engine block and mopped the sweat from her face. That had been a busy little passage of play! She looked again at the nightmare zoo of twisted humanity that littered the floor in every direction. Psychos, midgets…and now this, whatever the hell it was. She rested a foot atop the gigantic corpse of the helmet wearer and studied it more closely. It had been damn hard to kill, and the shrivelled head atop the withered neck was a thing of special horror. Nothing about that in her mission briefings! Compared to this lot, a group of homicidal bandits would have been positively comforting. She shook her head and wondered what she had walked into. She was getting a bad vibe from these bodies, each twisted in its own particular way. There seemed to be a theme at work here that left a truly bad taste. If this was a foretaste of what was yet to come, this would be a special expedition indeed.

She trod carefully amongst the wreckage of almost thirty bodies. Searching for suitable ammunition, Kali was gratified by the range of weapons her attackers had used. There was no standardisation of type or manufacturer. It was just the usual random equipage of Pandoran bandits; not an Atlas weapon in sight. She grunted satisfaction; it seemed that there was still a good chance of bringing this mission to a successful conclusion.

Kali stretched, took a deep breath. Her eye was caught once again by the great image of Lilith that dominated the room. She gave the Vault Hunter a salute and wondered for a moment at the nature of the artist, a denizen of this…special…place, and his motivation. Another Pandoran mystery! She shrugged and loped off into the darkness of the corridor, infra-red sensitive eyes picking a way through the rubble.

The world was silent once again, but Ticktock's hands clutched at his head, mind awhirl at what he had seen, what he'd felt. His heart beat like a machine gun with excitement at the thought that this astonishing woman had come into his life. Eyes lost in a vista of his own imagining, he was slow to react when he saw her entering the corridor. He jumped to his feet as she stepped into darkness. He needed her, wanted her, had to feel her touch! Afraid yet elated, he looked around at his home. Once so comforting and safe, it now felt empty. He stared at the entry to the hive. Where she went, he had to be. He padded past the broken bodies of his kin, and slipped into shadow, heart aflame.

Coming to a branching of the corridor, Kali brought up the map from her downloaded information of the facility. The 3D image hovered in her vision, the scale large enough to show it in its entirety. The map described this place as a mine, but Atlas had excavated and built on a massive and elaborate scale here. From the cliff-face entrance, the complex expanded in all directions. From her position near the vehicle bay _here, _tunnels led further into the cliff before opening into the vast refinery space. Beyond that again, the eridium mine-workings drove deeper and expanded into a network that honeycombed a cubic kilometre of rock. Overlying this, extensive accommodation, laboratory and administrative spaces occupied much of the remaining volume of the cliff to within a few tens of metres of the surface. She shook her head and smiled grimly at the journey still to go.

Atlas' code name for the place should have been Moria.


End file.
